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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Nowhere
Longing
Romantic
Destiny
Stronger
Life

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There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
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The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.
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Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
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Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
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On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.
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Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
Alain de Botton
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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.
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